The Outer Harbour Read online

  THE OUTER HARBOUR

  THE OUTER HARBOUR

  Copyright © 2014 by Wayde Compton

  US edition published 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  Suite 202–211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  Canada

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

  “1360 ft3 (38.5 m3)” first appeared in Prism international 43:4 (Summer 2005) and Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience (Norton, 2006), in both cases under the title “The Non-Babylonians” and in a somewhat different form. “The Lost Island” is a response to “The Lost Island” by E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake); her story, first published in Legends of Vancouver in 1911, is itself a reflection of a tale told to her by Chief Joe Capilano (Sa7plek). “The Instrument” first appeared in Event 40.1 (Spring/Summer 2011). “The Front: A Reverse-Chronological Annotated Bibliography of the Vancouver Art Movement Known as ‘Rentalism,’ 2011–1984” first appeared in The Fiddlehead 259 (Spring 2014).

  Cover art: Detail, “Merapi,” by Diyan Achjadi

  Design by Gerilee McBride

  Edited by Susan Safyan

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

  Compton, Wayde, 1972–, author

  The outer harbour : stories / Wayde Compton.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55152-573-0 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8555.O5186O98 2014

  C813’.54

  C2014-904455-0

  C2014-904456-9

  This book is dedicated to my father, Levi Compton Jr., 1938–2012

  CONTENTS

  1,360 ft3 (38.5 m3)

  The Lost Island

  The Instrument

  The Front: A Reverse-Chronological Annotated Bibliography of the Vancouver Art Movement Known as “Rentalism,” 2011–1984

  Inter River Park

  The Boom

  The Secret Commonwealth

  400 ft3 (11.33 m3)

  Final Report

  The Outer Harbour

  Acknowledgments

  Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.

  —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

  1,360 FT3 (38.5 M3)

  It is as if the apartment has become its own culture. Their lives serve the space where they keep the curtains drawn.

  Home from the afterhours, the three of them collapse on the living room couch. Riel flattens out the newspaper on the coffee table and just looks at it, not even trying to actually read. Kelly puts the situation into words: We’re coming down, so now what?

  Phone Frances, Erika says.

  Riel feels a twitch of despair. His body wants sleep. But that, he knows, will be impossible for hours yet. Another pass will delay the inevitable crash. Erika already has her phone open, is talking tersely to their fourth roommate.

  While they wait for Frances to get there, Erika flicks on some cartoons and sits in front of the television. Kelly gets out her crayons and notebooks and takes up a spot at the coffee table, going for the bright colours. Riel watches her doodle inconsolably and fiercely, and he watches the blue wash of the TV’s light shift across Erika’s face. He totters over to the CD player and puts on some Roni Size, and Erika automatically kills the volume on the TV her eyes never quite deviating from their fix on the animation flashing across the screen. Riel looks at Kelly and feels something near desire. She’s grinding her jaw, chewing on nothing, her mouth cycling with rhythm and without sound.

  By the time they hear Frances’s key in the door, Riel has been on his back on the couch for an hour going through the same somatic pattern: closes his eyes, thinks of sleep, realizes his eyes are open again, staring. The girls similarly get up, sit down, get up, and look out the window over and over.

  Frances breezes in. She says, How was it? Still high?

  Not quite, Erika says. Her nose is running and she sniffles loudly.

  Frances sits next to Riel, making him sit up. Louie Louie, she says to him loudly, setting down her infamous briefcase beside the Chronicle. You’re looking rough.

  She never calls him by his proper name, and Riel never corrects her. He can only assume, as everyone does, that he was named after the Métis revolutionary—but why, exactly, Riel does not know. His father vacated his life without ever explaining the odd christening. (He knows three things about his father: he is black, he is from San Francisco, and he is long gone.) As far as Riel knows, he has no Native ancestry, and all his mother can say about his name is that Riel’s father convinced her during her pregnancy that it sounded “musical.” Frances, a proud urban Cree, finds it amusing that a non-Native carries such a meaningful name for no real reason. She is polite enough not to make fun of him for it directly, but she makes her skepticism of the great man’s misinvocation known by always hailing her roommate with the song “Louie Louie,” sometimes even singing the Kingsmen’s melody as she calls him out.

  You know, Frances, I think maybe the best thing is that I just tough it out and go to sleep, he says.

  Kelly blanches at the suggestion. She opens her mouth as if to speak, but just sighs in quiet agony.

  No, Erika says. No. We’re going to hit it again. Summer’s almost over. When school starts, we’re going to have to get straight. That means we have to do as much drugs as we can now. That’s just how it fucking is.

  That and you called me all the way here, Frances says. You’re buying something.

  We want more and so does Riel, Kelly says. She glares at him.

  Frances fiddles with the combination lock on her case, covering one hand with the other to block their sight lines. Riel watches her hands for a moment, but looks across the room when she shoots him a glance. The case snaps open and she says, Okay. What do you need? I’ve got it all. I just saw Victoria last night.

  Who’s Victoria?

  Not a who, a where. My connection from the island was just in town. The lab rat. I’m so hooked-up now, it isn’t even funny. Up, down, and all around.

  After some haggling, Frances pours out three short rails of meth onto the Roni Size CD case. Intra-urban rails at best, Riel thinks, if “rails” they are: rapid transit shit, for sure, and definitely no John A. Macdonald, CPR, continent-spanning rails. But beggars aren’t choosers, and they are taking Frances’s crank on credit. Ostensibly, she is responsible for a quarter of the rent, but they always chisel the payment out of her in drugs before the first of each month, an overdraft Frances keeps meticulous track of. Riel can’t recall a single month of the last six that they haven’t ended up owing her money rather than expecting it from her on the first.

  Riel is spent
, and his body is crying out for mercy and rest, but he says, What the fuck? as a kind of grace, and hoovers up the acrid powder anyway. He feels like a rag doll one minute, but three minutes later he is standing up, feverishly hunting around for more drum ’n’ bass.

  Summer’s just about done, Kelly says wistfully, her head back to catch the nasal drip. I can’t believe it’s almost over. Let’s walk to the beach. I want to put my feet in the ocean.

  Let’s do it, Erika says. She stands up, looks around at everyone, smiles and nods like a mental case.

  Frances laughs. You’re nuts. You’ve been dancing all night and it’s six a.m. You’re going to walk to the West End? It’s like five miles away, you freaks.

  Riel puts on his shoes and starts lacing them up. Kelly and Erika watch him, then do the same. They all put on their sunglasses and start for the door.

  Frances, who only dips into her own supply on days of the month that are prime numbers (or so goes the myth she is known by), puts down her briefcase at the end of the couch, where Riel has just been, and lays her head upon it. Riel has seen her sleep like this many times, protecting her livelihood, he knows, from them—which only mildly offends him. He is always amazed that she can sleep with a four-cornered piece of luggage for a pillow.

  They leave Frances there and go sleeplessly down the apartment stairwell, on past the intersection of Broadway and Fraser, and all the way up Main to Terminal, west to Pacific Avenue, and through Yaletown, till they finally reach Sunset Beach. There, Riel, his girlfriend, and her best friend stand knee-deep in the greedy tide. They savour the last days of the first summer of the next one thousand years with hallucinations of motion in the peripheries of their sleep-deprived eyes. Riel turns to look and there is nothing there but that which is there. Chasing his own optic nerve. Sneaking up on a mirror.

  THE NEXT DAY, Riel wakes up and extricates himself from Kelly’s unconscious embrace. Erika is on the other side of her, sleeping too, still wearing her shoes. He notices there is sand and seaweed in the sheets. He sneers, gets up, scratches, stretches, and wretches twice. There’s nothing in his stomach, so nothing comes up. He goes to the living room. No Frances. He looks out the window. It’s sickeningly hot and bright out.

  After washing up and eating four pieces of unbuttered toast and a bowl of ice cream, he looks in on the girls. They’re still asleep, and he envies them, but nevertheless perches himself on the couch and picks up the newspaper he put there a day earlier. The article that attracted him returns to memory. He cradles his head in his hands and reads:

  MYSTERY MIGRANT FOUND IN SHIPPING CONTAINER

  VANCOUVER—Thursday, 23 August 2001—Longshoremen unloading a container ship yesterday at a Vancouver terminal were shocked to discover a single female stowaway of uncertain origin amongst the usual cargo.

  While offloading a container at Centerm, workers noticed the sound of a human voice coming from inside. They immediately broke the lock, opened the container, and notified the Vancouver Police Department. The standard 20' X 8' X 8'6" container had been converted into improvised living quarters, including a portable toilet, a supply of food and water, blankets, a battery-powered lamp, and small breathing holes drilled through the walls.

  The woman emerged gesturing frantically and speaking in a language none of the workers could identify. The container has been confiscated by the VPD, and the woman is currently being detained. Citizenship and Immigration officers are trying to determine her identity, which is at this time unclear.

  The ship itself—the MSC Quantus—was last loaded at the Kwai Chung Container Port in Hong Kong.

  Longshoremen interviewed on site disagreed about the woman’s appearance, one saying she was “probably Asian,” but another commenting that she might have been “Arabic.” One worker, who is fluent in two dialects, said he did not recognize her language as Chinese.

  Until her national origin can be determined, police will not comment on whether or not this is a case of human smuggling.

  Riel re-reads the article, then speaks its headline aloud to himself. Wanting to know the story’s development, he goes down the apartment stairs and up the street to a café, grabbing a house copy of the day’s paper. He orders a cup and settles in.

  Two summers earlier, hundreds of Chinese nationals arrived on the coast illegally from Fujian Province, packed onto rickety fishing vessels, and then too Riel watched a media circus develop around their incarceration and deportation. That was the same year Riel had first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice, books that had stirred and changed him.

  When he noticed that everyone in his family, and everyone else he knew in Port Corbus, were angrily unanimous about wanting the refugees sent home, he saw, for the first time, a cohesion among them he had never before fathomed. Everyone in his family was white; everyone he knew in Port Corbus was white. On the issue of illegal aliens, at least, all the people in Riel’s life thought alike. He developed a sympathy for the Fujian migrants. Could he help them somehow? Should he write a letter to the paper supporting them? What would El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz do? Riel read everything he could find about racism in Port Corbus’s small public library. Then he narrowed his hip-hop consumption down to only the wisest artists: The Coup, Dead Prez, and MC Kaaba. He re-evaluated his position that Bob Marley was something to do with the hippies who sold pot on Patourel Beach in the summer, and he bought every CD from Catch a Fire to Confrontation, poring over Marley’s lifetime of lyrics year-to-year as if they were a singular epic.

  Armed with a new political outlook, he challenged his teachers and wrote all his essays about racism. His grades improved. He cared about the essays he wrote, which counted for more than he had imagined to teachers in a resource-economy town with a high dropout rate. Riel had begun high school indifferently, but at the end was surprised to find himself accepted at his second choice of universities in the Lower Mainland. His mother and stepfather were pleased with his success, but dubious about his new stridency—which was, of course, the key to everything. That he is snorting his student loans and attending few of his classes is a turn he hadn’t anticipated, a turn that his family knows nothing about. He resolves to hide this carefully when his parents come down for a visit the week after next.

  But here, in the pages of the Chronicle, Riel finds a case of illegal immigration far more strange than those of 1999. It’s now Day Two of the story, and, as he expected, the paper is all over it. The Mystery Migrant is still in custody, but surprisingly, they haven’t yet determined anything about her: they can’t be certain of her point of origin or even identify the language she is speaking. The authorities refuse to speculate to the media, but there are already letters and an editorial about the case. The letters are all shrill and mainly depict her as some sort of terrorist or spy: What economic refugee can afford to send herself in such relative individual comfort? One of the letters calls for her to be sent home immediately, saying “she should be stuffed back in the container they found her in, locked up, and sent to Hong Kong with ‘return to sender’ painted on the side.” Riel chuckles darkly. They want her sent back, and they don’t even know where she is from. There was no photograph in yesterday’s paper, but this article is accompanied by a shot of the woman sitting in the back of a police cruiser. A streak of white—glare from the window reflecting the camera’s flash—bisects her face, but Riel can still see, examining her features, why there is confusion about her race. She looks, as they say, maybe Asian, maybe Middle Eastern. It’s hard to tell. Riel himself is used to being misrecognized. He traces her face in the photograph with his finger. Maybe Asian, maybe Middle Eastern. Where does one end and the other begin? There is such a thing as both, he knows.

  He puts the newspaper down and finishes his coffee. As Erika pointed out, summer is nearing its end and the start of school looms. The coming semester will be make-or-break because Riel is on academic probation. The apartment, friends, clubs, and drugs have come to eclipse everything else somehow. What he loves a
bout Kelly is how she drenches herself in bright colours and plastic accessories, like she’s wearing toys rather than clothes. She is quirky, in a steely sort of way. In the apartment’s kitchen she has multi-coloured refrigerator door magnets that are letters of the alphabet, and with them she’s spelled out THIS IS THE LAND OF YES on the white surface; beneath that, Erika added THERE IS NO SHOULD. Together these form the apartment’s own esoteric Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The scene is both cold-blooded and peace-and-love at the same time. It drew him in and turned him on. But he’s fucking up school. If he flunks out, he has no alternative plan. Erika tends to shut down this sort of talk by saying: Twenty-year-olds are supposed to fuck up. That’s our job. But Riel is not so sure. The girls are middle-class white kids of university-educated parents and seem sure that everything will eventually work out no matter how lost they get. Riel, however, suspects that he has just this one shot. If he fans on it, he’ll be feeding timber into a table saw in Port Corbus for the rest of his life.

  Riel takes the newspaper and walks back to the apartment. Inside, the girls are up and moping about, abstractedly tidying. Nobody speaks, and the three of them move as if the others aren’t there, like ghosts among the living. Riel goes to his bedroom and pulls a box cutter out of his desk, slices the photograph of the Mystery Migrant out of the Chronicle, scratching up the hardcover of a textbook as he does it. He pins the picture to the wall above and behind his computer, next to the photo of his other hero, MC Kaaba.

  To Riel, Kaaba is better than Tupac or Biggie, better than any other rapper, though far less famous. When he first heard Kaaba’s lyrics when he was fifteen, Riel was mesmerized by the strange mix of conspiracy theory, self-confession, and Koranic exegesis based on a Nation of Islam splinter group that Kaaba’s parents had raised him in, the Khufu Faction. Indeed, part of what first attracted Riel to Kaaba’s music was the connection he felt he had with the rapper because they both came from families belonging to weird religious minorities. Riel’s mother had re-married and converted to her second husband’s faith, so at age eleven Riel was baptized in his stepfather’s church, the New Occidental Jerusalem Church of Christ. Riel’s stepfather, Walker, had helped to found the church in Port Corbus in the 1960s with several other American draft dodgers who had come to British Columbia during the Vietnam War. (Riel’s mother seemed serially attracted to American exiles.) The church had begun as a hippie-oriented, LSD-soaked affair, but over the years had boiled down to a hard core of Jesus-freaks eventually pious enough to renounce drugs and free love. Riel once read a critique of the church on the Internet that referred to it as “a hippie revision of Pentecostal evangelism, created out of expatriate nostalgia.” He’d quit the church when he was sixteen.